Website Updates for Autumn 2018 from SnM Stuff

Over the next week or so, when you come to visit you’ll see a few website updates we’re doing for the autumn. It is a mix of minor bugfixes and improvements which should make it easier for you to use our site. This post should help you both see what we’re doing, but also is to help me keep track of the updats as we work through them !

Below is a list of the key things we’ll be doing. Initially it’s a bunch of titles, which will get fleshed out as quickly as I can make details publicly available.

In-Site Search

We’ll be trialling a new in-site search engine. It should deliver search results faster and more accurately, as well as reducing load on our servers for more results-heavy searches. What we’re hoping it will also do is act intuitively to start producing results while you are still typing. That may take a bit of configuration over time !

Bugfixes

See if we can get the Wishlist working (no promises – we previously found it conflicted with another plugin, but both have had updates which will hopefully fix the problem).

Fix Mailchimp reporting (which we think broke when we did some security improvements recently)

Facebook Shop

We’ll be adding a shop page which actually works to our Facebook page. What this should so is enable you to click to buy products and then be taken to our website checkout to pay. Again, it’s likely a bit of configuration will be needed to get it optimised !

Checkout

We’ll be adding Stripe as a payment option. Currently, all website payments go through PayPal including card payments. With Stripe, if you’re paying by card you will be able to choose whether it is porcessed by Stripe or PayPal. Additionally, we may (but no promises !) be able to get it to make ApplePay work.

Home Page Refresh

You will have seen the same Home page when you have visited our site for the last 18 months. So it’s time for a tune-up ! What you’ll see going forward won’t be radically different, just given a refresher. We expect it to be easier to get to product categories, and hopefulyl a little more mobile-friendly as well.

Edit 6th September 2018:

We’ve made good progress !

The new in-site search is up and running, appears to be working well, and is giving us data to enable us to fine-tune it.

The Home page is in progress and already lookiing fresher.

Most of the bugs have been fixed, although some things like the top search bar in mobile themes might take a day or two to propagate across the internet.

We’ve added Stripe as a payment option.

The only thing which hasn’t gone to plan is the Facebook plugin, which we’ve disabled as it was killing our servers trying to import all the products at a pace which meant it would take weeks to bring them all in.